The World Wide Web has matured into an integral part of daily life for users around the world. The Internet may be used for commerce, social transactions, and sharing of multimedia content. For example, electronic commerce has grown significantly in recent years. Consumer commercial transactions that occur over the World Wide Web or use protocols that leverage the Internet such as SMTP (email) are collectively known as “electronic commerce.” The current model for electronic commercial transactions typically involves one merchant and one consumer engaging in a one-to-one transaction in which a consumer selects a set of goods and/or services and pays for those goods and/or services through the merchant, and the merchant fulfils the order. The Internet may also be used to facilitate merchants' ability to target potential consumers for commercial transactions. A merchant may customize advertisements and provide the advertisements to selected users. In Google™ AdWords, for example, the merchants' customized content may be selectively displayed based upon search terms users provide to Google™. The content provided also provides a mechanism for users to access the merchants' site and, therefore, make purchases. Similarly, affiliate marketing allows a promoter to serve up a static text/image link to a visitor that allows for a click through to a page set by an Organizer. If the visitor takes action as set by the Organizer (visits a page, completes a form, conducts a transaction, etc.) an Affiliate Marketing firm tracks this action that takes place on the Organizer's server and completes a transaction based on the agreement between the Organizer and Promoter. After an action is taken by a Visitor, the Promoter's text/image link is in no way modified to reflect this incremental action or changes in form, function, and content based on this incremental action. Such commercial mechanisms may be considered to be one-to-many, allowing a single merchant to reach a large number of consumers.
The World Wide Web has also experienced tremendous growth as a social media. As a social media, the World Wide Web provides a vehicle for sharing user generated content, such as through blogs, personal profiles, videos, podcasts, and the like. Platforms for sharing user generated content, such as Blogger, Myspace, YouTube, and Facebook have been developed and benefited from this growth. Other mechanisms for facilitating social interactions, such as eVite, have also grown. Using eVite, for example, an organizer may set up an event, sent invitation emails to potential participants, manage RSVPs, estimate budgets, and perform other functions related to the event via dedicated pages on eVite. Moreover, social media and fundraising combine in social payments to raise money for a variety of causes. Social media may be used to provide “Blogathons” that raise money for charities, political campaigns, allow musicians to appeal directly to their audience to underwrite albums, raise money for schools, parties, clubs and sports teams, or other causes. In such social payment transactions, organizers may solicit funds from other individuals visiting blogs or sites.
In order to display media for a variety of purposes, conventional widgets may be used. The conventional widgets are often used to display content from a widget owner to a user. For example, a user may load a page, or site, containing the conventional widget and view content, such as video, provided by the conventional widget. Conventional widgets are generally embeddable, portable applications that often run without access to a user's file system. The conventional widget may be copyable by users. Thus, a user may copy a widget from a site to a location of the user's choosing, for example the user's own blog. Conventional widgets are also generally small in size and less complex than typical applications, such as email or word processing applications. However, there is typically no agreed upon limitation in size or complexity for conventional widgets. Such widgets may be used, for example, by bloggers to share
Although electronic commerce and social transactions are possible via the World Wide Web, there are drawbacks. Many social and electronic commerce transactions involve many-to-many relationships. Such relationships are not well supported by current electronic commerce and social media platforms. In addition, the ability of tools, such as widgets, to reflect individual users' tastes may be limited. Consequently, users' ability to engage in social, commercial, and other transactions including sharing of multimedia content may be limited.
Accordingly, what is needed is a method and system for facilitating social and commercial transactions via the Internet. The present invention addresses such a need.